OSCON: Life Extension

As icing on the cake today there was a BOF on Life Extension. My wife mentioned that that seemed strange. It doesn't seem that strange to me. It actually fits right in.

I would say I'm on the shallow end of Life Extension. I'm basically interested in finding an optimal diet and exercise regimen to help me stay healthy and active and mentally acute as long as possible. I can't say how hardcore I'm am even at this shallow end because I've only had this as a clear objective in my life for the last 6 months or so, so I can't say how permanent my changes have been. But I've lost weight and I'll soon be getting a physical to see how my cholesterol (which had been a bit high when last checked) is responding.

The session was led by Christine Peterson who also was one of the keynote speakers from the morning session. While by many standards she would be seen as hardcore (lots of supplements, mandatory 2 week vacations per year, strict weight control, etc) she was definitely middle of the road compared to the true extremes of the life extension movement. The truly hardcore take on the order of 100 supplements a day (how long does that even take to swallow?), or do calorie restriction, weekly intravenous treatments, etc. And then of course there is the backup plan of having your head frozen if you do die.

I'm not particularly opposed to any of the hardcore stuff I'm just new to this field of thought and haven't explored it enough to have a strong opinion either way. The one thing I'm intrigued by is the fact that if I live long enough I might get to take advantage of the increase in lifespan provided by medical advances. If science extends human life by a year (or more) every year, then who ever is alive at that point (and has the cash) could live a very long time.

In any case I signed up to get her slides emailed to me, so I'm going to have to wait until I get those before I can say more about any changes I might make. Until then I need to look again at taking some supplements.

100 Pushups

When I came across this link for doing 100 pushups I just sorted of laughed and thought to myself, "yah right". But the idea got under my skin and so as of a couple days ago I finished week 4.

100 seems like a magical number and impossibly far away. Even at the 4 week mark I'm only up to 40 (ok, 39 and 1/2).

But there *is* something magical about this goal to me. Surely if I can use discipline and hard work to get this goal then I've learned something important about what I *thought* were my limits. If I can reach this far past what I thought was feasible then where else have I unnecessarily limited myself?

Of course if I fail then I've just confirmed that I suck. :)

I'm guessing I'll (at the very least) need to repeat the last couple of a weeks at least once. But, I think I can do this....

OSCON: Damian Conway

I thought tonight that I'd try taking some notes while Damian spoke to try to give a sense of how cool his talks are. Unfortunately it seems that the ability to take notes on his talks is indirectly proportional to how cool his talks are.

And it it was cool. (Quantum Mechanics, General Relativity, Nano-Machines and programs that run in negative time - with example code).

And I have no notes. So it must have been pretty good.

OSCON: Python 3.0 conversion tutorial

This was actually more interesting than I was expecting. Anthony Baxter gave a full afternoon tutorial on the things that will change as we go to python 3.0 and some helpful hints on how to get there.

- Looks like python 2.7 is a pretty likely eventuality (but definitely nothing past 2.9 :)
- You can import in several features "from the future" in 2.6 to get some of the 3.0 flavor (print as a function, non-relative imports, etc).
- optional type declaration in function defs could be cool
- foo, *stuff, bar = my_list # will be awesome
- {1, 2, 3} # as explicit set constructor is handy
- lambda isn't going away (you knew that, I just like to remind you). But so long my old friend reduce... :(

I'm very interested to try out the 2to3 converter. Actually the word I want is probably scared. I think alot of my personal code will be fine but the code at work will be a bear to get converted. Well, maybe it will force more wide spread unit testing (the real goal of py3k).

In any case I left the session more interested in 3.0 and less afraid of the conversion process. But I have a feeling it will be a couple years before this happens at work.

OSCON: seaside tutorial

Randall Schwartz gave an interesting seaside tutorial on Monday. Here are the slides.

I have been through a few squeak tutorials and seaside tutorials but was interested to see the big picture presented in one shot. I enjoyed the tutorial but I have to mention a couple of things that bugged me.

- tutorial spent way too much time on the basics (of smalltalk) and not enough on the cool stuff that makes seaside completely awesome (e.g. didn't get to the last 1/4 or so of slides). This is totally understandable because I think it's expected that most people haven't messed with smalltalk before and the syntax would probably be pretty distracting on a first view. Maybe it's time to have a seaside master class.

- Randall made a comment about how other web frameworks have continuations now. He cited django as an example. Hmmm... that doesn't seem right. My best guess is that he confused ruby (which has continuations) and python. But as far as I know neither rails or django use continuations.

But in general it was well done (despite the typos ;-) and I hope to see a continued/growing seaside presence at OSCON. This is the 3rd year in a row that has had at least one presentation on seaside. Maybe we need an in depth look at dabbledb next year...

Here is a seaside tutorial I recommend.

[added: 2008-07-23]
Reading the above again, the tone seemed more negative than I intended. Just want to leave the final thought that I really enjoyed the tutorial. It was well thought out and well presented. It's just easier to focus on the little nits. :)

Setting up / using gblogger (on windows)

Here's a few things I needed to do that weren't immediately obvious to get gblogger setup and get my first post posted using emacs on windows with cygwin.

• Manually edited the makefile and set up the editor because emacs wasn't in my path.
  
  EMACS = "/cygdrive/c/Program Files/Emacs/emacs/bin/emacs.exe"


• Installed curl, xsltproc (via libxml2, libxslt) in cygwin


• (don't forget to setup email/password for account you want to post to)


• From this I found the "magic number" and url to use for posting. I opened up my main blog page and found the url after <link rel="service.post">.

And that was it. I originally thought I would use gblogger because it would encourage me to blog more since I'm always in emacs anyway. But the interface/usage is a little klunkier than I was expecting, but possibly this is just my unfamiliarity with the system. I intend to play with it a little more.

Testing gblogger for emacs

Whee!